From January of 95 until June 30 of this year, we worked under a
contract. No overtime pay, no fringe benefits, no vacation or sick
leave and, because of the way our billing was set up, if we chose to
concentrate and spend more time assisting a client, we received less
pay. With only so many hours in the day, providing extra services to
a client meant that other clients received less service.
When I worked for the State, we belonged to the Washington State
Employees Union. It was a rather weak union, but did hold the State
to the agreements in our contract.
In truth, my wife and I took good jobs away from union workers. The
state cried that it had no FTE's(full time equivalent's), but had the
dollars to pay rehab services for older blind, if they did not have to
add in all the fringe.
We would have been called Scabs, back in my dad's younger years.
Uber and Lyft employed Scab labor. These drivers are working for bare
minimum wages, and the companies have total control over how much the
drivers can live on. Like all good Capitalists, Uber and Lyft know
just how to squeeze a bit more blood out of their "turnips".
Anyone who supports contract labor has been brainwashed by the Ruling
Class. Corporate America is organized, and even when the corporations
are quibbling among themselves, they unite together to break up the
few remaining Labor Unions. Labor needs to take a page from the
Ruling Class.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/11/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
ELECTION 2020: Uber & Lyft Notch Another Victory in Global Exploitation of
Gig Workers
November 11, 2020
Bama Athreya says this showdown was about who defines employment, and it
has
worldwide implications for the future of work.
Rickshaw puller in India. (Needpix.com)
By Bama Athreya
Inequality.org
Workers have just lost a bruising fight over "gig" work in California. In
the lead-up to the election, Lyft even threatened to suspend all operations
in the state. Why would the company even think of pulling out of such a
lucrative market? This particular showdown was about who defines
employment,
and it has global implications for the future of work.
The fight started in 2018, when California's highest court had the audacity
to suggest that Lyft, Uber and other platform companies abide by the
nation's employment laws. The companies refused to comply. So, in 2019
California's legislature passed a new law, Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) to
reinforce the point. The companies continued to misclassify their workers,
so California's Attorney General brought suit against them in May. Nearly a
year later, Lyft's response to a court order to obey the law was to
threaten
to close down.
While fighting California's attorney general and courts, the companies also
aggressively pushed a ballot initiative to repeal AB5. The initiative,
Proposition 22, relied on false premises to make the case that it would be
good for drivers, as the University of California Berkeley's Labor Center
has helpfully noted. When the California attorney general created an
accurate description of what was in the measure, companies sued to change
the language to suit their PR spin.
The attorney general's language remained on the ballot, but the spin
continued. Supporters stooped to tweeting the home address and other
personal information of Veena Dubal, an employment labor law professor at
the University of California Hastings College of the Law and a vocal critic
of Uber and Lyft.
In the final days leading up to the election, the fight over Prop 22 took
increasingly bizarre turns. Corporations took liberties with the facts as
they pushed in-app messages to passengers claiming "your driver supports
Prop 22," forced DoorDash delivery people to drop off Prop 22 propaganda
with their deliveries, and paid for deceptive mass mailings purporting to
be
from progressive organizations with names like "Feel the Bern."
For the moment, this blitz of disinformation has succeeded. About 58
percent
of California voters sided with Uber and Lyft to approve the ballot
measure.
Uber self-driving vehicle Volvo XC90 in San Francisco. (Dllu, CC BY-SA 4.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
In total, platform companies spent more than $200 million to convince
Californians to accept working conditions that are more common to
developing
countries. One of their tactics was to place gig worker statements in media
and social media outlets claiming that they benefit from their supposed
"flexibility" and "independence."
I wish Proposition 22 supporters could meet some of the platform workers
I've met and interviewed in other countries. In many countries, workers
have
always had "flexibility" and "independence." They call it informal work.
And
now that the apps have entered their economies, they are actually losing
their autonomy in frightening ways.
Here are two stories of how apps changed platform workers' lives, but not
in
the ways they had imagined.
Apps & Rickshaws in Cambodia
In Cambodia, a country where the minimum wage is just a few dollars a day,
motorcycle rickshaws (tuk tuks) have been common for many years. In the
past, drivers would negotiate fares directly with passengers. On a good
day,
a driver in the country's capital city might net $10 or so. They had
"flexibility" and "independence."
They also have had very few other options for better, more stable,
higher-paying jobs. It wasn't a great life - but today, it's even worse.
Drivers I met last year told me you can no longer get a passenger without
an
app. Drivers no longer have freedom to haggle over fares or even know what
fare will be paid before they accept a ride. Take "Vuthy," who told me he
can no longer refuse a ride even if the fare isn't profitable. If he
doesn't
accept rides at whatever fare is set by the platform, he risks being
"deactivated" or removed from the platform. And this could mean losing his
livelihood.
Apps & Wrecked Car Services in India
Another story comes from India. Jude had been a successful entrepreneur
prior to the apps entering the market. He owned a half dozen cars, employed
a few other drivers and provided private hire car services for clients in
Chennai, a major Indian city. When Uber entered the market, it promised it
was looking for "partnership" with independent contractors like him. Jude
thought this seemed promising. After all, his business experienced the
normal friction of getting the word out to clients, and the apps seemed
like
an easy way to enhance his client base.
Indian cab driver "Jude." (The Gig Podcast website)
Little did he know that the apps would actually take away his longstanding
client base. Uber took client data not only from Jude but from other
private
hire companies, as well, and far from providing freedom or flexibility,
wrecked the market for small companies by monopolizing the client data.
Jude
and his drivers lost the ability to negotiate fares and other terms of
service. And he found he couldn't leave the platform without losing his
entire client base. [Listen to Jude's story on The Gig Podcast.]
Scripted Testimonials
This is the model that the companies defended in California. The scripted
testimonials for the Prop 22 campaign site were revealing. Spokespeople
admitted they used gig work to supplement regular income. They talked about
the need to "hustle."
Here's a typical recent response from @ChopstixKisser on Twitter: "The
whole
gig economy/on demand model is what made it successful. It's one of my two
hustles, the other being managing six apartments, which is enough work
where
it would very difficult/impossible for me to also manage a W-2 Style job."
Another sponsored post, from "Clarence," glorified the fact that the poster
doesn't earn enough at his "day job" and needs the supplemental income. It
all sounds very much like India or Cambodia.
The Misleading Statistic
In the Prop 22 campaign, the companies cheerfully claimed that "80 percent
of drivers work less than 20 hours a week." And this misleading statistic
belies a critical feature of their business model: the platforms rely
almost
entirely on 20 percent of the workforce to do almost all the work.
They couldn't survive without that 20 percent of the driver base that works
full time and handles 80 percent of the actual gigs. Mary L. Gray and
Siddarth Suri describe this lopsided distribution of gig work in detail in
their excellent book Ghost Work.
So why do the companies need the 80 percent, who only provide a fraction of
the labor? One way to see it: the 80 percent are being used as a huge
on-demand scab labor force. So those who are extolling the virtues of their
"flexible" gigs should keep firmly in mind that this "flexibility" exists
because of the full-time workers who keep the company solvent.
Converging with Informal Economies
Driver in Bogota, Colombia, with Uber app on dashboard-mounted smartphone.
(Alexander Torrenegra, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By debasing California's labor classification laws, it's possible the
companies are creating a slippery slope to undermine even our most basic
labor protections. Might we descend into a return to child labor and
modern-day slavery? While this may seem farfetched, the U.S. economy is no
longer "developed."
It's converging with other informal economies around the world.
So, it's important to consider the situation of a Cambodian tuk tuk driver
in debt for his vehicle and unable to make payments because platforms are
causing decreasing fares. Or in India, where a union has reported that
drivers are committing suicide because their vehicles are being repossessed
by the banks.
In both these countries, debt bondage can lead whole families into slavery.
Tech is transforming these economies but workers aren't better off, so we
have to imagine these ways in which the United States might be transformed.
From Cambodia to California is a shorter distance than we may think. Prop
22
will only accelerate the pace of exploitation.
Wave of Organizing
But as we see generational shifts in our national political life, let's
turn
our eyes to the wave of organizing, not only in California but around the
world, that compelled companies to go to these extreme measures to defend
their position. To be sure, the passage of Prop 22 has dire implications if
allowed to stand, as the ballot initiative allowed corporations to set a
dangerous undemocratic precedent. Companies wrote Proposition 22 to
undermine labor protections. But here's what else they did: effectively
prohibit elected representatives from revising the law in future.
As a Bloomberg correspondent reported:
"Buried deep in the measure's mind-numbing legalese, is a rare proviso: The
authors prohibit any change to the law unless it's consistent with the
proposal's intent and can garner a seven-eighths majority in each house of
the state legislature."
This is Citizens United on steroids.
The corporate campaign to push Prop 22 was the most expensive ballot
initiative campaign in California's history. The lesson for corporations:
expensive campaigns to flood voters with disinformation works well. And we
should expect more of it in future campaigns - unless we rein it in.
Here's the good news.
President-Elect Joe Biden came out in support of workers, and opposed the
initiative, as did numerous other major Democratic candidates. Senators
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren took very strong stands on the rights
of
"gig" workers, and we have an opportunity to hold them to these positions.
And their support happened not by accident, but as a result of a major wave
of gig worker organizing around the United States, and mirrored with
successful organizing in other countries.
The companies have built their business model on a house of cards, but the
organizing is proving to be real and durable and based not on
disinformation
but lived and shared realities. Time for fact-based policymaking when it
comes to labor protections for all workers.
Bama Athreya is the head of gender, equity and inclusion at Laudes
Foundation. Follow her at @bathreya1 or @PodcastGig
This article is from Inequality.org
The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not
reflect those of Consortium News.
